No Progress on Foundational Problems of QM?!

The foundational problems of Quantum Mechanics QM formulated when QM was born 100 years ago include:

1. Derivation of Schrödinger's Equation SE from physical principles.
2. Physical meaning/interpretation of wave function as solution to SE.
3. Collapse of wave function. Measurement. Role of Observer. 
4. Exponential computational complexity. 

When I ask chatGPT about main advancement as concerns foundations of QM, I get the answer: 

• Bell's theorem + experiments showing that a local hidden variable theory is not possible.

This result says nothing about 1-4. 

When I confront chatGPT with the above, I get the following summary:

• So the honest state of play: after 100 years, the big puzzles are still puzzles. What has changed is that we now have sharper theorems, operational frameworks, and experimental constraints. The problems haven’t been solved — they’ve been better defined.

Try yourself for a more detailed response. We expect chatGPT to tell what physicists say, not hallucinate what physicists do not say.  

What we see is an expression of the crisis of modern physics witnessed by leading physicists: No progress on the foundations of QM. The foundational problems formulated in 1925 are all left without resolution. A physicist will tell you that anyway QM works perfect to predict outcomes of experiments, and that it does not matter that nobody understands why. QM just works fine in its original form and it is meaningless to ask for something else: "Shut up and calculate".  

There are always open problems in a physical theory about reality as a sign that the theory is alive, but if problems concerning the very foundations of a physical theory appear to be unsolvable over a very long time, as is the case with QM, then it becomes more and more urgent to check out if the theory is not well formulated and so needs a reformulation to allow a solid foundation.

This seems to be the case with QM since 1-4 are still without answers. 

So what is the main problem with QM in its standard text book form as StdQM? One aspect directly stands out:

• The wave function $\Psi (x_1,x_2,....,x_N)$ for an atom with $N$ electrons depends on $N$ 3d coordinates $x_1$,$x_2$,...,$x_N$ thus on altogether $3N$ spatial coordinates. 

This means that the wave function $\Psi$ has no direct ontological physical meaning and so has no physical representation showing what is. The meaning given to $\Psi$ is instead epistemological in the sense of what we can know as observers. Max Born gave $\Psi$ such a meaning in terms of statistics of experimental outcomes, which saved the day in 1925, but presented unsolvable problems, which have haunted modern physics into the presents crisis.

The multi-dimensionality of the wave function is involved in all the problems 1-4, and so it is not far-fetched to suspect that it is the origin to all the foundational problems. 

This leads to asking: Is there an alternative wave function which only depends on the 3 spatial dimensions of real physical space?  Yes there is: Real Quantum Mechanics RealQM offering:

1. A New Schrödinger Equation NSE based on physical principles .
2. Clear physical meaning of wave function as solution to NSE.
3. Observer independent.   
4. Linear computational complexity. 

Compare with what leading physicists over the years have said about the lack of answers to the foundational questions:

• Niels Bohr
  "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."

• Werner Heisenberg
  "The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts."

• Albert Einstein (skeptical)
  "God does not play dice with the universe."

• Wolfgang Pauli
  "One should no more rack one’s brain about the problem of whether something one cannot know anything about exists, than about the ancient question of how many angels are able to sit on the point of a needle."

• Richard Feynman
  "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."

• John Archibald Wheeler
  "No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon."

• J. Robert Oppenheimer
  "If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must say 'no'; if we ask whether the electron’s position changes with time, we must say 'no'; if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must say 'no'; if we ask whether it is in motion, we must say 'no'."

• Stephen Hawking
  "When we cannot predict, we cannot say we understand."

• Steven Weinberg
  "In the Copenhagen interpretation, there is no reality until observation. The more we study quantum mechanics, the less clear it becomes what reality is."

• Roger Penrose
  "Quantum mechanics makes absolutely no sense." (in the sense that it works perfectly but defies ordinary logic).

Modern Physics as Non-Newtonian Crisis Physics

When modernity struck society at the turn to the 20th century boosted by rapid technological development, the pressure in arts and science to take a radical step away form classics mounted, posing in particular a challenge to leading theoretical physicists such as Planck and Lorentz firmly rooted in the deterministic rational world of Newton-Maxwell. How to become modern?

Planck was the first to surrender in his derivation of Planck's Law of blackbody radiation by resorting to statistics to show modernity.

Lorentz resisted longer faced with an apparent absence of a unique medium/aether for the propagation of electro-magnetic waves, which he approached with a Lorentz transformation between different Euclidean coordinate systems moving with constant speed $v$ with respect to each other, which transformed physical space-time coordinates $(x,t)$ into new "primed" coordinates  

• $(x^\prime ,t^\prime ) =\gamma (x-vt, t-vx)$ 

with $\gamma =\frac{1}{\sqrt{1-v^2}}$ with $v<1$ and 1 speed of light. 

Lorentz carefully pointed out that the "primed time" $t^\prime =\gamma (t-vx)$ with dependence on the space coordinate $x$ was not physical time. The Lorentz transformation was not between different expressions of real physics. 

In 1905 the young patent clerk Alfred Einstein picked up the Lorentz transformation with the bold assertion against Lorentz that $t^\prime$ was physical time and so formed his Special Theory of Relativity SR based on the idea of giving the Lorentz transformation a direct physical meaning resulting in the puzzles of "space contraction" and "clock retardation" and "relativistic mass" as real physics.

SR met the pressure of modernisation of physics by opening to a fundamental revision of Newtonian mechanics as the most formidable achievement of rational human thinking, behind the booming industrial society. A formidable challenge!

Nothing could be more revolutionary modern than to say that Newton's Law of gravitation does not describe the action of gravitation on all scales of the Universe as classic physics said. But such a bold plan fell short because SR said nothing about gravitation. Einstein came back in 1915 with his General Theory of Relativity GR with that message/plan:

• Newton's theory of gravitation must be replaced by GR.
• Newton must be replaced by Einstein.
• Modern physics = Einstein. Old physics = Newton.

The deep crisis of modern physics of today can be seen as the result of implementing this plan, while hiding that Newton is still used in all real contexts where always GR is useless.  

Let us then take a look at the main reason for replacing Newton by Einstein. We then find that the root cause presented by modern theoretical physicists is conceptual rather than experimental: 

• Newton's Law appears to involve instant-action-at-distance. 
• The gravitational forces between two bodies at a specific time instant $t$ appears to depend only on the distance between the bodies at time $t$. 
• It appears that there is no time delay as if gravitational force is instantly updated between moving bodies.  
• A concept of apparent instant-action-at-distance cannot be formed, because action-at-distance is transmitted by gravitons as force carriers necessarily traveling with finite speed. 

We next ask for experimental evidence that apparent instant-action-at-distance is not observed. Are there observations of apparent action delay? Physicists will tell you that the only direct evidence of delayed gravitation is the LIGO experiment (2015) claimed to measure the effect of a merger of two black holes to be a gravitational wave reaching the Earth after a delay of 1.3 billion years, as a change of distance of 1/400 of the size of a proton over 4 km, with a relative precision of $10^{-21}$. 

LIGO is thus the only direct experimental evidence contradicting apparent instant-action-at-distance (Mercury says nothing against). The smallness of the effect compared to the cause is beyond  imagination. It cannot be justified to replace Newton with anything/GR from this single measurement. Yet this is what is done, and no wonder that a crisis emerges.

How then to make sense of apparent instant-action-at-distance. Why emphasise apparent? In many posts I have tested the idea that the connection between gravitational potential and  mass distribution (through Poisson's equation) is not by a causality from mass to potential by instant-global-action, but the other way around from potential giving mass to a body by instant-local-action. Such an arrangement can give the apparent impression of instant-action-at-distance, while fundamentally it is not. 

The idea connects to the discussion in this recent post about the presence of a global gravitational potential defining global simultaneity. Here gravitational force is not transmitted by gravitons as force carriers but is instead carried by the gravitational potential ready to deliver it in instant-local-action. No gravitons have been detected.

Summary: The only direct evidence against a Newtonian theory of gravitation as instant-action-at-distance is a LIGO signal, which can be questioned because of the very high precision required to single it out from noise. The reason to dismiss Newton is conceptual in the sense of denying any concept of apparent instant-action-at-distance, and not practical since Newton is used in all forms of reality.

If Newtonian gravitation is kept, then the present crisis from incompatibility between GR and quantum mechanics evaporates and effort can be focussed on advancing modern physics instead of handling crisis. 

A modern theoretical physicist confronted with this evidence will react by surprise that something like that can even be expressed, trained to believe that only Einstein's GR theory of gravitation is truly fundamental with its curved spacetime and that Newton's theory is only a trivial toy version of GR, which is not at all fundamental. The training is so efficient that no argument appears to allow a change this conviction.   

Modernity is now more than 100 years old, and modernist fashions of cubism and atonal music are no longer modern. There is now good reason to replace the fashion of curved spacetime with a renaissance to Newton. 

Logical Fallacy of Modern Physics?

Aristotle would have been very surprised to see that modern physics in the form of Standard Quantum Mechanics StdQM is filled with his logical fallacy of "affirming the consequent" or "confirming an assumption by observing a consequence". 

Examples: 

• If there was a Big Bang, then a Universe would have been come into existence. We observe that a Universe exists, and conclude there was a Big Bang. 
• If the Higgs boson exists, there will be blip on a computer screen. We observe a blip and conclude that the Higgs boson is real physics worthy of a Nobel Prize.

The incorrect form is: If A implies B and B is observed to be true, then A is true. Cannot be used as verification of A.

The correct form is: If A implies B and B is observed to be false, then A is false. Can be used as falsification of A.

But we have been confronted with the incorrect form so many times that we are immune to the logic fallacy of "affirming the consequent". 

The motivation using this logical fallacy over and over, is that the assumptions of StdQM cannot themselves be checked because of their evasive physical nature, and so the only possibility has been to observe some observable consequence to see if it is the case, and then use that as evidence that the assumption is satisfied. 

This is not so in classical mechanics, where the basic laws in the form of Newton's law of gravitation or Coulomb's law of electrostatics can be directly checked. Then there is no need to resort to logical fallacy and the science has a better chance to capture reality. 

Is it then true that the basic assumptions of Schrödinger's Equation SE for the Hydrogen atom cannot be checked? No, they can be directly be checked because SE for the Hydrogen atom is based on

1. Coulomb's Law
2. Kinetic energy in the form of compression energy of charge density. 

Both can be checked directly as in classical mechanics. It means that after verifying 1-2 we can predict the spectrum of Hydrogen to be exactly that observed. What could happen is that we observe some "fine structure" of the spectrum and we can then conclude that there is something missing in the set up for 1-2 such as non-zero magnetic field. 

The trouble with StdQM is that the generalisation to atoms with more than one electron leaves the setting of 1-2 and adds assumptions which cannot be directly verified because they concern a multi-d wave function living in some Hilbert space, which has no physical meaning. What remains is to check consequences of the presence of such a wave function and use that as confirmation of correctness of the added assumptions, then resorting to the logical fallacy.

Now there is a version of quantum mechanics named RealQM which is based solely on 1-2, in principle,  and so the assumptions of RealQM can be checked, at least in principle, and so RealQM takes the same form as classical mechanics and so does not need to resort to incorrect logic. Maybe quickly check it out?

Pauli Exclusion Principle vs Periodic Table

In 1925 Wolfgang Pauli introduced a 4th quantum number into the budding new physics of Quantum Mechanics QM in order to explain the observed two-valued periodicity of the Periodic Table PT with $2\times n^2$ electrons in shell $n=1,2,3,...$ giving the sequence $2, 8, 18, 32,..$. 

Pauli was unhappy with his "two-valuedness" or as an ad hoc pick without physics. He was comforted a bit by Uhlenbeck and Goudsmit who named it spin with two values "spin-up" and "spin-down" still without physics. 

What emerged was Pauli's Exclusion Principle PEP stating that two electrons with different spin can occupy the same atomic orbital, but not with same spin, which quickly came to serve a fundamental role in QM. But Pauli was still unhappy with PEP when he for the “discovery of PEP” in 1945 received the Nobel Prize in Physics, because PEP lacked physics and so could be “discovered” as physics, just imagination. What in fact prevented two electrons with same spin to occupy the same orbital? It was like a law prohibiting same-sex marriage, unphysical and no longer valid.

Today PEP is enforced asking wave functions to be anti-symmetric motivated by a cocktail of Lorentz invariance, locality and stability taken from (relativistic) Quantum Field Theory QFT.

The argument chain is: 

• QFT implies anti-symmetry. 
• Anti-symmetry implies PEP.
• PEP implies two-valuedness/spin.
• Two-valuedness/spin is observed in PT. 
• Conclusion: QFT, antisymmetry, PEP and two-valuedness/spin is all confirmed. 

But the logic is the incorrect logic of confirming an assumption by observing a consequence, as noted by Aristotle. 

Back to the PT: The actual periodicity observed is 2, 8, 8, 18, 18, 32, 32,.. with repetition of periods, and this is not explained by PEP not really by QM either, as remarked by Eric Scerri as authority of PT.

How then to explain the actual periodicity? Let us take a look at Real Quantum Mechanics RealQM as an alternative to the Standard Quantum Mechanics StdQM of above with anti-symmetric wave functions.

In RealQM electrons appear as charge densities with non-overlapping supports and the arrangement of electrons in an atom becomes a packing problem. It starts with the two electrons of Helium packed to occupy two half-spheres meeting at a common separating plane. 

This arrangement serves as origin of two-valuedness with the next shell to be filled consisting of two half-shells each one allowing a natural division into $2\times 2$ subdomains, the next one into $3\times 3$ subdomains altogether forming the original sequence of periods $2\times n^2$. 

The period doubling can then be explained as the result of electron packing where the next shell to be filled after 2 and 8 is not wide enough to allow division into $3\times 3$ only $2\times 2$ et cet.

It appears thus that RealQM can give an explanation of the periodicity of PT based on solid physics of packing of electron charge densities. 

Pauli passed away in 1958, and since then there is nobody questioning PEP by asking for physics. Maybe there is still reason to do so? To explain the repeated periods of PT?

PS A $n\times n$ subdivision of a half-shell reflects eigenfunction configuration of a vibrating square membrane, which connects the the orbitals of StdQM given by the eigenfunctions of the Hydrogen atom. 

 

Mixing Time into Space: Not Physics!

Modern physics is based on Einstein's Special and General Theory of Relativity SR and GR based on concept of spacetime where time is mixed into space as expressed in particular by the Lorentz Transformation LT as the essence of SR. This makes modern physics counter-intuitive with surprising strange effects of time dilation, space contraction and relativistic mass.

Let us take a fresh look at the idea of mixing time into space and ask if it can be possible from physical point of view. Consider a physical world composed of physical bodies with the following characteristics:

1. A physical body has extension in space coming with positive mass. 
2. Extension in space is manifested as existence of the body as the collection of its parts at the same time, that is simultaneous spatial existence/configuration. 
3. It is not meaningful to consider spatial existence of an extended body without simultaneity.  
4. Change of spatial configuration of a body can be seen as a body clock measuring progression of object time in terms of spatial change.
5. Two objects can interact by spatial contact, which synchronises object clocks to read the same.
6. Spatial contact between the parts of a body establishes simultaneity over the body.
7. A physical world does not carry a coordinate system to monitor its changing state. Object configurations change by simultaneous contact, which is represented by changing object configurations without need of representation in human made coordinate systems.
8. A human made spatial coordinate system can be a 3d Euclidean coordinate system fixed to the Earth, Sun or distant galaxy. 
9. Simultaneity of contact respects causality between two objects in the sense that agreement of order in time is possible.  

Notice that SR breaks 2-3. Spatial existence in SR has no extension in space and does not include simultaneity, which means that causality as order in time cannot be secured. Physics without causality cannot work.

So far this is a mechanical world without gravitation, governed by contact. Gravitation can be added by introducing a gravitational potential which depends on simultaneous spatial existence of all the physical bodies of the world asking for complete object time synchronisation (OS). 

Is (OS) possible? How can two far away bodies synchronise time without contact? Is it possible that  the gravitational potential as a massless field carries a master clock and gives birth to object/mass configurations along with object clocks synchronized to the master clock? This connects to the need of "absolute time" in Newtonian mechanics. It represents a non-standard form of causality where the gravitational potential is primary and mass distribution secondary, or possibly have equal roles in a perfect harmony in the sense of Leibniz. 

The gravitational potential of the Universe would thus as extended field carry a simultaneity of presence like that of an extended material body, a simultaneity instantly transmitted to material bodies as gravitational force synchronising all object clocks.

We thus arrive at a material world connected by simultaneity carried by changing spatial configurations connected to a master gravitational potential. 

In any case there will be no mixing of space into time upsetting simultaneity. This is fundamentally the view of Leibniz.  

Summary: In world without gravitation simultaneity is established by spatial  contact, and serves no role without contact. In a world with gravitation, a master gravitational potential can establish global simultaneity, to be used in electromagnetics. 

Einstein in Alice Wonderland

This a follow up of the previous post.

The mathematician Lewis Carroll anticipated Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity SR (1905) in his famous Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) filled with "space contraction" and "time dilation" as core themes of the book. Very amusing and mind boggling! Einstein must have read the book in his youth, although he did not read much, since the connections cannot be accidental. 

In a further discussion with chatGPT representing mainstream professional physicists view, the following is made clear:

• A matter-only world is a Newton world to be Galilean invariant. 
• Adding light changes this matter-only world to be instead Lorentz invariant, even if there is no interaction between light and matter.
• Adding light to a matter-only world "reveals the true spacetime structure" to be Lorentzian and not Galilean as only an approximation of Lorentzian. 

This is really a very Grand Plan for the world and it is important to see what the basis is. We thus recall the form of a Galilean transformation and a Lorentz transformation between two space-time coordinates $(x,t)$ and $(x^\prime ,t^\prime )$ in two inertial systems moving with speed $v$ with respect to each other, assuming  speed of light = 1:

• Galilean: $x^\prime = x-vt$ and $t^\prime =t$.
• Lorentz: $x^\prime = \gamma (x-vt)$ and $t^\prime =\gamma (t-vx)$ with $\gamma =\frac{1}{\sqrt{1-v^2}}$.

We see two very simple linear transformations so simple that even Alice would understand the mathematics. We see the "time dilation" aspect of Lorentz in the dependence in the primed time coordinate $t^\prime =\gamma (t-vx)$ on the space coordinate $x$. In short, a Lorentz transformation mixes space and time, which a Galilean does not. 

The idea carried by modern physics is now that a Lorentz transformation reveals the "true nature of spacetime," which thus is not that of a Galilean transformation. 

But is this credible? How can a simple linear transformation reveal the true nature of a spacetime without physics? 

A Galilean transformation expresses that measurement of velocity depends on chosen coordinate system in a specific simple way, while Nature does not use any coordinate system at all. Physicists are thus free to chose coordinate system as they like and Nature will not protest.

Lorentz clearly stated that a Lorentz transformation has no physical meaning. But a Galilean transformation can be given direct physical meaning in the form of meter sticks moving with constant velocity keeping their length and clocks unaffected by such motion. 

But this kind of argumentation is dismissed by a modern physicist because it questions Wonderland Science. The Lorentz transformation in all its simplicity is claimed to reveal the "true nature of spacetime" and there is nothing more to say. Discussion closed. Forget what Lorentz said!

SR was from the beginning met with neglect or skepticism and in the motivation for the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics to Einstein the Nobel Committee explicitly expressed that the Prize was given to Einstein despite his SR physics never done before or after. In the 1920s quantum mechanics took over with a Galilean invariant Schrödinger equation (1925) followed by a Lorentz invariant Dirac equation (1928), which took over the scene when Schrödinger left the field quickly thereafter. Dirac's equation gave SR respectability, while Einstein was removed from the scene by Bohr. 

Today SR is kept like a toy model with amusing properties, but is no longer subject to scientific study. But the idea of spacetime with time mixed into space is alive in Einstein's General Theory of Relativity GR also believed to reveal the "true nature of space time" now as "curved spacetime". But no Nobel Prize to GR either. Maybe the true nature of space and time is not revealed in a coordinate transformation…

  

Einstein: Both Maxwell and Newton are Wrong!

In recent posts I have been searching for an explanation of the current crisis of modern physics, which is deep and sadly acknowledged by all prominent physicists and philosophers of physics. 

One striking aspect of modern physics is that it is presented as "strange", "weird", "counter-intuitive", "paradoxical" with unsettled "foundational problems" since 100 years without progress. To be compared with classical physics, which is rational and understandable and not strange at all although it can exhibit very complex dynamics showing surprising emergence.

The new aspect of strangeness into physics was introduced by Einstein in 1905 in his Special Theory of Relativity SR to be the academic work opening an academic career from his position as patent clerk in Bern with little training in mathematics and physics. Einstein gambled high: Derive new physics from  very few very general principles or Postulates with this Grand Plan:

• Show "Maxwell is wrong" because he assumes a "unique aether" for propagation of electromagnetic waves/light.
• Show "Newton is wrong" because he assumes "absolute space" and "absolute time".
• In particular: Show "no-aether" and "relative space-time."

Einstein then decided to start from the following Postulates:

1. Laws of physics take the same form in all inertial systems.
2. The speed of light is the same in all inertial systems 

Here inertial systems = standard Euclidean space-time coordinate systems moving with constant velocity with respect to each other.

To facilitate showing "Maxwell is wrong" Einstein attributed "unique aether" to Maxwell, which is not correct since Maxwell works well with any inertial system, and so Maxwell is a "many-aether" theory,  as many aethers as inertial systems. Maxwell without any aether/inertial system does not make sense because without, Maxwell's equations cannot even be formulated.

To facilitate showing "Newton is wrong" Einstein attributed "absolute space" to Newton, which is not correct since already Galileo understood that Newton's equations read the same in all inertial systems connected by a Galilean transformation, and so Newton is also a "many-aether" theory.  

We observe that Maxwell satisfies Postulate 1+2 and so cannot be wrong within SR as being based on these two Postulates. Einstein's attempt to prove "Maxwell wrong" thus failed and so he ended up with "Maxwell is right" which was what everybody said then and still says. SR said nothing not already very well known about Maxwell/light.

As concerns if "Newton is wrong" follows from the Postulates, we observe that Newton satisfies Postulate 1 under Galilean transformation and Postulate 2 about speed of light does not concern Newton because Newton does not speak about light but about matter. Einstein's attempt to prove "Newton is wrong" from Postulate 1+2 thus failed.

We conclude that Einstein's Grand Plan of proving "Maxwell is wrong" and "Newton is wrong" from SR based on Postulate 1+2,  thus failed. Compare Summary below!

We may now ask if anyway SR contains some physics of interest as derived by Einstein from Postulates 1+2? 

This was addressed in this post concerning Einstein's "derivation" of the Lorentz transformation by identifying two different light signals to be the same by disrespecting physics. 

In any case, after having derived the Lorentz transformation on loose grounds, Einstein concluded that "Newton is wrong" by not being Lorentz invariant, which did not make sense since Lorentz invariance is born out of Maxwell's equations for light and so does not connect to Newton's material mechanics. 

We conclude that SR does not prove either Maxwell nor Newton to be wrong. This should be welcomed by modern physicists trained to believe the opposite and then having to accept that "physics is strange". Maxwell and Newton are not strange, only Einstein!

If you want to dig more into Maxwell as a "many-aether" theory, take a look at Many-Minds Relativity.

In particular it would be a big relief if "Newton is right" could be reinstalled into physics. This would open to a Unified Field Theory since Newton and Maxwell are fully compatible as mass-based Newtonian gravitation and light without mass leaving possible interaction open to some new additional physics. 

Unfortunately modern physics has given in to adopt Einstein's "Newton is wrong because of SR" taken to represent stunning progress beyond classical physics. But experimental evidence must then be presented and that has shown to be very difficult to collect, to be honest. This is what usually is presented by modern physicists as best evidence that "Newton is wrong":

• Perihelion Precession of Mercury (1859)
• Michelson–Morley Experiment (1887)
• Deflection of Light (1919 eclipse expedition)
• Time Dilation of Muons (1949).
• Gravitational Time Dilation of photons (1959)

We understand that only the Perihelion Precession of Mercury concerns Newton's mechanics, the other concern essentially light, and we have in this post inspected the evidence and seen that it is weak, in particular because it is not SR which is claimed to show "Newton is wrong", but General Relativity GR.

We thus see that modern physics has to struggle very hard to show that "Newton is wrong". Of course this is expected when remembering that Newton's law of gravitation follows from conservation of energy and force in a gravitating material system, as the message of many posts. 

We conclude that Einstein's research plan to show "Newton is wrong" was based on ignorance combined with great ambition, and so did not work as science, but miraculously it worked politically to make Einstein the greatest physicist all times, securely displacing Newton to a second place. It is here much of the crisis of modern physics is rooted.  

You can always find a reason to dismiss a scientific theory by finding some irrelevant aspect which "is wrong". You may e g dismiss Newton's law of gravitation because it does not say anything about gravitational bending of light, because it says nothing about light at all, only about matter. But that lacks scientific reason and so could have only political reason. What is most important with a theory is that it is correct in a certain sense under certain circumstances, not that it does not apply to everything and does not tell everything.

If it so happens that light is affected by matter-based Newtonian gravitation by some physical mechanism yet to be discovered, then that could be added to Newton. But it would not mean that "Newton is wrong" as concerns matter. Yes, there are claims of "relativistic effects" appearing when matter reaches velocities near the speed of light, but that can only be achieved experimentally in supercolliders stretching physics to the extreme.  

Although the above arguments are logical and simple, they will meet opposition from a modern physics community carefully trained to believe that "Newton is simple+wrong" and "Einstein is strange+right".  Physics becomes much more manageable under a banner of "Newton is simple+right" rather than the opposite.  

Summary of SR agreed with chatGPT:

• SR does not add anything to Maxwell as theory of light.
• SR claims "Newton is wrong" because "Newton is not Lorentz invariant". But the nature of Newton/matter/mechanics is to be Galilean invariant and so the claim lacks logic.

What apparently happened is that Einstein became so taken away by "elevating" the Lorentz invariance of Maxwell's equations to a "general principle of relativity" demanding "all physical laws to be Lorentz invariant" as if playing God. What happens if you "elevate" a special case to a General Principle?

Another thing is that the Lorentz invariance of Maxwell's equations has to be handled with care since the Lorentz transformation mixes time into space in an unphysical way. This is was what Lorentz said when inspecting his transformation carefully pointing out that the "transformed time was not physical time", which Einstein failed to understand and so went on to form SR relativistic mechanics without physics. But Einstein succeeded with his Grand Plan to become the greatest physicist all times! Now Einstein is gone since 70 years and maybe it is time to move on without him and leave "strange physics" to the history of  failed attempts from "elevating" some special case to General Principle.

Tim Maudlin: Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics

This is follow up of the previous post on formalistic vs realistic physics.

Tim Maudlin is a realist philosopher of quantum physics in the following sense declared in the Introduction to Philosophy of Physics: Quantum Theory (interview here):

• A physical theory should clearly and forthrightly address two fundamental questions: what there is, and what it does. 
• The answer to the first question is provided by the ontology of the theory, and the answer to the second by its dynamics. 
• The ontology should have a sharp mathematical description, and the dynamics should be implemented by precise equations describing how the ontology will, or might, evolve.

Maudlin then proceeds to describe three theories (Collapse, Many-Worlds and Pilot Wave theories) which meet these demands, starting with a declaration that the Copenhagen Interpretation does not.

Maudlin does not like the term "realist", "realistic" or the opposite, claiming that "physical theories" are neither "realist" or the opposite, but the above declaration I think qualifies him to be a realist like Schrödinger rather than formalist like Born-Heisenberg. 

The question is then if the three above theories really satisfy the demands given. Already the fact that there is more than one theory raises questions, if there is only one reality. If not, then Many-Worlds comes in, but that ontology is very shaky. Collapse Theory and Pilot Wave Theory concern the One-World we are part of and build on a multi-dimensional Schrödinger Equation SE. The trouble with SE is that multi-dimensionality is way beyond the three dimensions of the observable world and so has been given no physical meaning at all,  or as last straw a statistical meaning as somehow describing different possibilities rather than realities. To replace what is with a wide range of possibilities and to argue that realism is not destroyed, requires a bit of good work and it is not clear that Maudlin succeeds. Note that he prepares for success by offering might evolve as alternative to will evolve, thus opening to statistics and the Copenhagen Interpretation he does not like...

In any case, the multi-dimensionality of SE in its standard form as the basis for both Collapse and Pilot Wave theories is the root trouble when seeking a description of what is and what it does. RealQM offers an alternative in 3d meeting these descriptions. 

Let me ask Maudlin to take a look at RealQM to see if his demands are satisfied in this case keeping the strict will evolve and not just might evolve.

Added: 

It seems that Maudlin answers that the Pilot Wave theory fulfills his demands of reality because the particles carried by the Pilot Wave are real, and then the multi-d Pilot Wave as solution to Schrödinger's equation also must be real. Something telling/carrying real particles what to do that in some real way and so must itself be real in some sense. The problem is that the what is and what it does of that Pilot Wave is hidden or maybe not there at all...

Realists vs Formalists: Modern Physics vs Mathematics

In the 1930s two main battles were shaping (quantum) physics and mathematics into our time, between realists and formalists with the following main actors:

• Physics formalists: Bohr-Born-Heisenberg.
• Physics realists: Schrödinger-Einstein.
• Mathematics formalist: Hilbert.
• Mathematics realist: Brouwer. 

The outcome of the battles were opposite. In physics Bohr-Born-Heisenberg took over completely and kicked out Schrödinger-Einstein. In mathematics Hilbert was defeated by Brouwer assisted by Gödel and Turing. 

Thus formalism took over physics and realism took over mathematics, opposite to the natural idea of (classical) physics as connected to reality and mathematics to formality. Very surprising and strange.

Mathematics as realism of constructivism/computing is today booming with AI the remarkable reality of Large Language Models LLM.

Physics as formalism is today in a state of deep crisis detached from reality back to medieval scholastics about interpretations of formalistic quantum mechanics without conclusion. 

Is it possible to bring back realism into quantum physics, not by another interpretation of the given formalism, but by replacing the formalism by realism? Maybe, in any case Real Quantum Mechanics RealQM is an attempt to do so. Why not take a look?

A position as realist is comfortable: There is a reality out there independent of any observation. The objective of physics is to describe this reality in constructive mathematical terms allowing computational simulation and comparison with observation. Reality cannot be "weird". 

A position as formalist is awkward: If there is no reality corresponding to the formalism, it is just a game. It is thus necessary to somehow connect formality to reality, but starting as formality, the connecting physics to be invented may come out as "weird", which is how Feynman-Bohr were selling quantum mechanics and then very successfully because "weird physics" suited media.

The formalists took over quantum physics because the basic model of quantum mechanics in the form of the multi-dimensional Schrödinger Equation SE was not derived from only assumptions about physical reality, but also included an element referred to as "kinetic energy" obtained as an analog of classical kinetic energy $\frac{p^2}{m}$ with $p=mv$ momentum with $m$ mass and $v$ velocity, by simply replacing the quantity $p$ by the differential operator $i\nabla$. Black magic formalism with a new form of "kinetic energy" without connection to motion! 

RealQM is based on a different SE where the "kinetic energy" appears as a "compression energy" of realistic classical mechanics. 

Since the multi-dimensional SE was accepted as fallen from the sky without origin in physics, it became impossible to question SE on objective physical grounds and the debate fell apart into endless quarrel about interpretations. 

To take a step out of the crisis it necessary to question the multi-d SE and seek to find a formulation based in physics and not in pure formalism. Ok?

Quantum Paradoxes and Physical Reality: Harvey Brown

Harvey Brown is a philosopher of physics with a realist approach developed in his book Quantum Paradoxes and Physical Reality starting with the following basic questions of modern physics:

1. Do the basic entities of atomic physics, such as electrons, photons, and so on, actually exist independently of the observations performed by physicists?
2. If the answer to the previous question is positive, is it possible to comprehend the structure of atomic objects and the evolution of atomic processes, in the sense of forming spacetime images somehow in correspondence with their reality?
3. Should one formulate physical laws in such a way that one or several causes are given for all observed effects?

Harvey maps positive answers to opponents of quantum mechanics:

• Ehrenfest, Planck, Einstein, Schrödinger and de Broglie, 

and negative to defenders of quantum mechanics: 

• Sommerfeld, Born, Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, Jordan, and Dirac. 

Basically a split between realists and formalists.

The situation today is that the formalist attitude is completely dominating, and that a realist attitude is shown only by a few realist philosophers of physics such as Tim Maudlin and Harvey Brown himself. 

To the realist camp I can add RealQM with positive answers to 1-3. It may be that positive realist answers tmay help progress better than negative formalist.